Strikingly builds mobile sites in 10 minutes and is trying to get faster

Entrepreneurs wear their failures like badges of honor, proof they’ve learned business start-up lessons the hard way. But few experience a defeat as helpful as David Chen’s.

His first business, started at the University of Chicago in 2010, offered a way for student groups and student government funding committees to allocate money. But he discovered that most student groups didn’t need money for much more than setting up their websites.

Chen and his partners watched their idea — joinstart.com — sputter and die. But when they stopped focusing on how to make the site work better, and started looking at what their would-be customers were saying, they saw their opportuniity — setting up easy-to-build websites.

So they created strikingly.com, designed to let anyone create a simple yet attractive and useful website in minutes, even seconds.

“We needed it ourselves, and realized that other people need it,” he said by phone from his native Shanghai.

Strikingly.com today is striking for its rise on the startup scene, having emerged out of Silicon Valley’s legendary Y Combinator program, and it raised more than $1.4 million from California venture capitalists this year, Chen said.

Chen, who graduated last December from the University of Chicago, now travels to California regularly, as he waits to secure a work visa. He said he and his strikingly.com partners, Dafeng Guo and Teng Bao, are focused on perfecting the experience of their site.

It is based on the principle of a one-page site, in which new slides can emerge as the user scrolls down. The service allows anyone to create a site for free, with premium charges for things such as special domain names.

Chen said the typical user takes about 10 minutes to build a site. But a just-added one-click site-builder function potentially drops the time to seconds by tapping into profile and contact information, including a profile picture, from a user’s Facebook account, he said.

He said most people use it to create a simple Web presence but that some have used it to make digital love letters or remembrances for deceased loved ones.

“We want to create something that has an emotional connection with our users,” he said. “We want to make everyone a creator, and not just a consumer, of the Internet.”

The key, he said, is simplicity.

“We don’t want to be the most comprehensive web builder; we want to be the most simple,” he said, adding that it was essential to design the site so that it’s compatible with mobile applications. “In mobile, you have to be simple.”

Chen would not say how many users the company has. But he said it has seen 40 percent growth over the last 10 months and has broken even on its initial investment, without using any of its VC money.

He said focusing hard on the user experience is still the priority. The goal, he said, is to create “superfans.”